How the Braze Data Platform enhances flexibility and fosters collaboration

Data is the lifeblood of modern customer engagement, allowing brands to evolve their strategies from generic, one-size-fits-all campaigns into highly relevant experiences that speak to the unique characteristics of individual consumers.

But while Marketing teams are awash with data, many organizations aren't set up to effectively capitalize on all the information they have. Finding ways to overcome this hurdle is essential, as easy access to the right data is a catalyst for deeper engagement, increased conversions, and lifelong loyalty.

Technology and data hygiene are two key ingredients in solving this issue. The Braze Data Platform offers a comprehensive set of data capabilities and partner integrations designed to help marketers bring their data together in one place, activate it to drive business-specific outcomes, and share it with other parts of the organization to build synergy.

We’re already seeing it having a positive impact for our customers: Australia-based Luxury Escapes, a premier travel brand, uses the Braze Data Platform to sync and manage data between their data warehouse and their customer engagement platform, and achieved 142% of their membership signup goal with data-driven, advanced personalization.

New integrations to optimize the bi-directional flow of data

Imagine you’re getting ready to launch a new campaign. To make this happen, you need customer and product data stored in various systems, which are managed by your technical counterparts. To access the data, you must make a request, which can take time to be fulfilled, leading to the data you ultimately receive being out of date. .

As a customer, it’s not only frustrating to receive messages that are not relevant, or out of date, but it can have a material effect on customer sentiment. To help prevent marketers from sending messages based on out-of-date information, Braze offers direct, high-capacity, persistent connections to the most popular data warehouses and storage solutions via Cloud Data Ingestion,including AWS S3, DataBricks, Google BigQuery, Google Cloud Storage, and Snowflake.

At Braze, we are focused on prioritizing integrations with best-of-breed ecosystem technologies that make real-time, bi-directional data sharing easy, in the service of superior customer engagement. As part of this effort, we’re now expanding our CDI integrations to include Microsoft Fabric (GA).

Brands leveraging Microsoft Fabric as their data warehouse can now directly access comprehensive, real-time data held there for use in highly relevant customer engagement programs–without ongoing reliance on technical teams for data access. Braze also supports zero-copy access to data stored in Microsoft Fabric, allowing brands to securely use their proprietary data for segmentation and personalization, without needing to create additional copies. This not only streamlines workflows, but can be especially important for brands in highly regulated industries such as financial services and healthcare that tend to have more stringent data policies.

Braze has also enhanced our partnership with Shopify, simplifying the integration to swiftly set up Shopify stores, streamline identity resolution, and leverage prebuilt Canvas templates to build memorable moments. This allows marketers to quickly activate common eCommerce use cases, makes it simpler to align with their shoppers’ evolving preferences, and activate real-time insights.

At its core, customer engagement produces a breadth of data that can provide valuable insights to assist decision-making across various business units. To make it easier for other parts of your organization to benefit from the data that your marketing efforts create, we’re expanding our Currents Connector library to include the Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform (GA). This allows brands to drive journey analytics in Adobe Experience Platform using customer engagement data from Braze, enhancing their ability to make informed decisions.

Understand and engage customers better with improved flexibility and ease of use

Picture this: You’re sifting through your user records, trying to identify and merge duplicate profiles in order to maintain a unique, accurate, and comprehensive representation of your end users. When done manually, this is difficult and monotonous, as people engage with your brand across various platforms and don’t always log in or use the same credentials, making it hard to connect their behaviors to a single user profile.

Thankfully, there’s a better way. Automated Identity Resolution, now generally available, allows marketers to more easily de-duplicate user profiles, making it easier to avoid a fragmented view of their audience, which can lead to the wrong messages being sent to the wrong person. Or worse: unnecessary and costly duplicate sends.

In addition, our new Report and Dashboard builders make it possible for marketers to more easily understand the impact of the experiences they’re serving up to users and then optimize those campaigns based on up-to-date performance analysis. These intuitive, user-friendly tools track overall performance, visualize opportunities, and adapt engagement strategies in real time, enabling you to deliver campaigns that drive results.

For retail and eCommerce brands, new Recommended Events allow marketers to swiftly set up their campaigns, supporting stronger engagement and more conversions. Quickly get started with pre-defined events like ‘product viewed,’ ‘cart updated,’ ‘checkout started,’ and ‘order placed’. Use prebuilt Canvas templates to easily create and execute campaigns, leverage off-the-shelf reports and dashboards to get a better understanding of customer behavior, and build moments that truly resonate with your audience.

Improve efficiency by empowering marketers and reducing the burden on technical teams

Imagine that you’re looking to clean up some out of date information in your customer engagement platform as part of an audit of your marketing data. In many cases, removing inaccurate or irrelevant data requires reaching out to technical stakeholders within your organization, and again waiting around until they are able to prioritize the project alongside their core responsibilities.

It doesn’t have to be this way. To give marketers more control over their data – while also freeing up time for technical teams – Braze is introducing Custom Data Deletion, now available in GA, which allows Marketing teams to seamlessly delete outdated or messy data with just a few clicks. The upshot? Marketers can work more autonomously, without needing to enlist technical help at every step. Streamlining this process allows technical teams to focus on high-impact projects that truly require their expertise, while marketers can move quickly and efficiently. It's a win-win that allows everyone to work smarter, not harder.

In a similar vein, we recently released a new API Usage Dashboard (GA), which allows technical teams to monitor and visualize API traffic in Braze. This tool supports more effective collaboration around customer engagement efforts by ensuring that members of technical teams supporting Marketing can stay informed about their data flow and focus their troubleshooting efforts in the right place in cases of discrepancies.

Final thoughts

Data is essential to effective marketing, but only when brands have the right tools and strategy to be able to use it to their full advantage. The Braze Data Platform makes it possible to master data ingestion and exports, gain a holistic picture of each customer’s behavior, and support a better, more efficient partnership between Marketing and technical teams going forward.

Ready to do more with your data? Learn more about the Braze Data Platform and harness your data to delight customers at every interaction.

Forward-Looking Statements

This blog post contains “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the “safe harbor” provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including but not limited to, statements regarding the performance of and expected benefits from Braze and its products and features. These forward-looking statements are based on the current assumptions, expectations and beliefs of Braze, and are subject to substantial risks, uncertainties and changes in circumstances that may cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Further information on potential factors that could affect Braze results are included in the Braze Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal quarter ended January 31, 2025, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on March 31, 2025, and the other public filings of Braze with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The forward-looking statements included in this blog post represent the views of Braze only as of the date of this blog post, and Braze assumes no obligation, and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements, except as required by law.